Making a friend

I’ve written here before about assorted cultural conscious raising experiences, but last weekend’s was unique—three “cultural” activities, each with a different purpose and a different tone. All three were time well spent, each in its own way, but the bigger story (for me) is the amazing bit of self-realization I encountered along the way.

The day started with a meeting of the local chapter of Old Lesbians Organizing for Change (OLOC), a national group whose local chapters vary greatly in how they live out their name, “organizing for change.” The post-potluck program (the potluck is, of course, required for all lesbian events) was a video about an old lesbian couple—a growing new genre of films, documentary and fiction. It’s an interesting marker of the progress we’ve made toward visibility and the hesitant acceptance of both LGBTQ people and LGBTQ aging. More about that another time. (Soon, since I have a radio show on the topic coming up in January.)

From OLOC, we went to Sound Circle’s solstice concert. Many of you know about Sound Circle and their marvelous music, and anyone who reads this blog knows how much I love them. I’ll have more to say about them in a minute.

And from there, we rushed off to a roller derby match. Yup, you read right: roller derby. I’d never seen a roller derby match before, never even considered it as something I particularly wanted to do. But a colleague of my partner does roller derby in her spare time, so there we were, squeezing into the crowd in a chilly warehouse. Scores of folks come to watch women in colorful (and sometimes weird) costumes swirling around the oval track, doing their best to bump and block and generally disrupt one another en route. I don’t especially need to go back, but as a cross-cultural experience, it was really interesting—and it does indeed seem to have a whole culture wrapped around it. There’s currently a picture/sign in the Walnut Café that asks, “When was the last time you did something for the first time?” Good question. This was my answer. Here’s a picture to prove I was there. I’m not in the picture, to be sure, but I did take it.

So, in the middle of that cultural sandwich was Sound Circle. Their solstice concert is always an excellent way to welcome the return of the light, and this one, with a theme sketched of sleeping and waking, dark and light, rising and falling, seemed perfect for the season. I especially loved a few songs: “Something Inside So Strong,” an anti-apartheid song, and “Woke Up This Morning (with My Mind Set on Freedom),” a song from the Civil Rights movement, reminded me of last weekend’s experiences and of OLOC’s mission, “organizing for change.” Their inclusion in this concert also seemed brilliant, a twist that translated the theme of rising and waking, shifting it from the seasons to the realm of human striving. And then there was this marvelous piece called “Snowforms” by Murray Schafer. Shafer introduced the term “soundscape” and popularized the field of “acoustic ecology,” which sees sound as part of the environment. So naturally, his music depicts the environment through sound. "Snowforms" uses Inuit terms for various kinds of snow to punctuate this wonderful drifting, flowing, sometimes crunchy musical soundscape. The music is so non-standard that the “score” doesn’t have staffs and notes. Instead, it takes the form of swooping waves, white on blue, intended to depict sounds, not neatly structured music. It takes a group like Sound Circle to pull this off, I imagine. It was delightful. And a nice nod to winter.  

As always, I loved this concert. But it was different for me from earlier ones with Sound Circle. And that’s the real point of this blog.

First, I should mention that I never used to consider myself much of a fan of choral music. I appreciate the fact that many voices can create sounds that a single voice (or a few voices) cannot. And I know, in principle, that a chorus represents something important in itself: a synergy among people that says something meaningful about human existence, speaks to our desire for community. Still, until recently, all of that was just theory to me. But over the past few years, as I’ve started hanging out around folks, my partner among them, who sing in choruses—Sound Circle and Resonance Women’s Chorus, in particular—my feeling about all this has shifted. It was gradual, I suppose. Hearing more choral music in general, hearing choral music that’s this good, hearing people who sing in (and direct) choruses talking about the experience. It all had an impact, I’m sure, although I wasn’t especially thinking about it.

Until Saturday. And then I got it. I realized that I was experiencing this concert in a whole new way, and it surprised me. I took more pleasure in noticing the different voices, whereas before, I just heard the overall sound. I found new delight in the variations in mood created by different songs—I heard it more in the music and I felt it more in the audience. I was more delighted than usual by the energetic songs, and I got more absorbed in the reflective songs than I usually have (although “Praises for the World” has always moved me to the core and remains in a class of its own). And I was more aware of the musical skill of the singers, individually and collectively. Simply said, the music touched me more. I was genuinely sorry to have it end. Despite the fact that I had a roller derby match to attend.

Now, it’s possible that I was just more “present,” more mindful, more attentive than I’ve been before. But I think it’s something more. “So what was it?” you’re probably asking. I wondered this myself, even during the concert.

Why, I asked myself, is this so much more engaging for me today? My answer: I think it’s because I’ve grown such a different relationship with music lately. I’m hanging around with music a lot these days, spending time with it, sometimes alone and sometimes in company. I’m playing with it, listening to it, watching how it relates to other people and they to it, asking it questions, wondering what it wants. We’re becoming friends. And this process of getting acquainted has changed how I understand music and, quite apparently last Saturday, how I relate to it.

I didn’t come to this new friendship easily. Never having been a singer, my relationship with music was always as an outsider, an observer, not a participant—not the best way to form a friendship, I realize. So, from this less-than-intimate perspective, I think I always thought that music was something that other people did, not me. And that people who could sing just did. They’d stand up, open their mouths, and lovely music would pour out. Well phrased, perfectly on key, precisely modulated. It’s nice, I thought to myself, but it’s no big deal. It’s just what they do, because they can. And then Sue Coffee, the director of Sound Circle and Resonance, asked whether I’d like to be involved in some way with Resonance. That led to my unexpected journey into a new friendship with music.

I’ve written here before about my recently assumed role as “Assistant Maven” for Resonance, one result of Sue’s inquiry. In this role, I get to share space with the chorus as they practice every week. I halfway expected it to be boring. But it turns out to be fascinating. It first challenged and now seems to have changed how I understand singing and choruses. Listening to these women prepare for a concert, sound by sound, line by line, song by song, I’ve rather quickly come to a whole new appreciation for how much work it takes to make music sound good. From them, I’ve learned that the synergistic power of choral music, wonderful as a whole, also reflects all the countless pieces it encompasses. Individual notes, individual voices, individual parts magically stirred together—all in the context of relationships, carefully tended.

Another part of this path has been my unexpected and tentative personal foray into singing. Never (ever!) having thought myself a singer, the invitation to become involved in Resonance made me wonder, vaguely, whether I might be able sing in the chorus. Before daring such an outrageous step, I decided to take a voice lesson or two. Now, I still don’t think of myself as a singer, except in the broadest sense as someone who sometimes sings out loud, and I'm not singing in the chorus. But I have discovered that learning to sing is actually fun. It’s made me more comfortable with my voice (“more” not equating to “very”) and more comfortable with singing out loud in a group—like, during the sing-along part of a Holly Near concert. What’s more, I actually enjoy these activities. A lot.

And taking voice lessons (those words seem so improbable to me!) has also given me the opportunity to hang out on a regular basis with someone who is a singer (in Sound Circle), as well as a musician in ways I can’t even imagine (how do you even begin to “do an arrangement” of a whole song?). One of the most important lessons for me has been her talking, casually, about her own singing. “When I’m working on a song …,” she says. And I’m thinking “You? Working on a song?” Hmmm. Maybe good singers don’t just stand up and open their mouths to let the music escape. Or she says, “When I’m performing, I have to remind myself to …” So then I wonder, “You mean to tell me that you’re actually thinking about what you’re doing? You’re working on doing it right? It doesn’t just flow from you like water from a faucet?” It almost seems like making good music is like any relationship: it takes work. Really?

This is a bonus I never expected from these activities—in fact, I never would have known I’d be interested in a “friendship with music.” But sought out or not, this combination of experiences appears to have changed music for me.

Heck, I even hear the 5 a.m. clock radio differently. Truly.